Sapphire HD6950 Flex 2GB

Intro

After covering the Barts-series HD 6850- and HD 6870 cards thoroughly it's time to
move up the product tree and take a look at the HD69-series Caymans. The HD 6950 and HD
6970 cards are the fastest single GPU offerings from the current lineup, and should
offer plenty of oomph for even the most demanding games. The exact model of the card we
received is Sapphire Radeon HD 6950 Flex Edition 2 GB, and it also packs some neat
special features.

Package & Specs

AMD Radeon HD6850

AMD Radeon HD6870

AMD Radeon HD6950

AMD Radeon HD6970

Nvidia Geforce GTX 570 Ti

Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 Ti

GPU

Barts

Barts

Cayman

Cayman

GF110

GF114

Stream processors / Cuda cores

960

1120

1408

1536

480

384

Core speed (MHz)

775

900

800

880

732/1464

822/1644

Memory speed (MHz)

1000

1050

1250

1375

950

1002

TPD (W)

127/19

151/19

200/20

250/20

219

170

Looking at the specifications the Caymans are very closely related, and in fact many
users have been able to flash their HD 6950's to HD 6970's. In HD 6950 1408 stream
processors are enabled and they're running at 800 MHz. The GDDR5 memory is clocked at
1250 MHz and the maximum power consumption is rated at 200 W, and the idle at just 20
W.

Looking over to the Nvidia lineup the Caymans should compete with the GTX 560 Ti and
GTX 570 cards.

The card arrived to our review packed in a massive box with all the specifications
printed around it. Inside the box the card comes very well padded to keep it safe from
the bumps of the shipping.

We haven't seen such extensive bundle in quite a while. Not only does the card come
with the usual manual, driver CD and crossfire bridge, but there are also mini-DP to
DP-adapter, HDMI-DVI-D adapter, two 6-pin power adapters and also a HDMI-cable.